


His Most Lucid Dream

by macabre



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Domestic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-26
Updated: 2012-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 22:17:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/496240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Inception. Dom, true to his word, gives up dreamshare for his family. This includes Arthur - the point man just doesn't quite realize what it means yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Most Lucid Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smaragdbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaragdbird/gifts).



Arthur, who arguably knows Cobb best after the death of Mal, finds himself surprised when, even after all his vocal proclamations that he’s retired, Cobb never touches a PASIV again post Fischer job. He understands that his extractor won’t take jobs any longer, but he had thought there would be nights or even days when they had time to themselves when Dom would go under again, maybe build Arthur his own dream home or an entire city filled to his decadent tastes. These moments do not come, and after playing it safe at home with Dom and his family for a couple of months, Arthur decides to start working again. 

“You’ll be careful,” Dom says, lying in bed next to him. “I want to know every job you’re on. You’ll tell me the details, so if something happens-“

“Nothing will happen. We’ve already done the most dangerous job I’m ever liable to do.” Arthur slips off his reading glasses, folds them neatly on top of his paperback, and turns out the lights. “A position you put me in, if I do recall.”

There’s no tone of accusation in his voice, but he knows this will quiet Dom. He’s never forgiven himself for putting them all at risk, but he’s never apologized either. Arthur understands, he does; Dom did what he had to, and now, Arthur will do what he needs to do.

“You won’t even dream with me anymore,” he whispers. It’s too dark to see Dom’s face, but arms crawl around his sides and pull him forward. A kiss at his temple. 

“You’re all I dream of now.”

It’s quiet in the house for now, just the two of them awake. Arthur can’t imagine how this all came to be, how he came to love someone like Cobb and take up the role of adoptive parent to two children. He can’t remember how he gave up his life for Dom, stopped working with anyone besides Dom, and when Dom didn’t work, neither did Arthur. Now Arthur finds himself alone in one department, but very rich in the other. The problem is, he doesn’t know how to be happy with just one. He needs the other.

His first job back is easy, too easy, and does little to satisfy the itch; he comes home, nodding at Dom who is playing with the kids on the floor, and goes into their study to immediately hook right back in. He doesn’t particularly enjoy building, but now he does it out of necessity. Maybe he’ll even take a job as an architect; it’s a skill that he can expand on, a real challenge. He looks at the crumbling walls of the house in his dream, a house eerily familiar even if he didn’t intentionally build it, and thinks that he will never be as good as Cobb.

When he wakes up, Dom is sitting by his side, reclining as if waking up with him. He smiles at him and gently slides out the needle, applying a thumb on the needle site. Kissing him, he easily slides a bandage on the juncture of his elbow without a downward glance.

“How’d it go?”

“Fine,” he says. “Everything is fine.”

 

 

Arthur realizes that James and Phillipa have officially adopted him when they argue who will sit in the booth next to him at dinner or when Phillipa asks him, distinctly not Dom, to make her cookies for the bake sale at school. Meanwhile he practices soccer, football, basketball, and amateur wrestling with James, who judges victory based on how many times he can make Arthur smile. Dom confesses this to him late one evening after they’ve tucked him into bed. 

“You saying I should smile more?” Arthur frowns; Dom laughs. 

“I think it’s a fun game for him to play.”

The next time an impromptu boxing match turns into a wrestling match, Dom helps James get Arthur onto his back. They tickle him mercilessly; he’s not actually ticklish, but he laughs so hard all the same that his side hurts after. They all lie on top of each other in a great lump breathing heavily until Phillipa runs in screaming and throwing herself on top of the pile. Arthur barely manages to catch her before she lands on top of her brother and crushes him. 

When he closes his eyes, Arthur has to reach for his die to prove to himself this is all real. Before he touches it, he feels a hand shyly trace his mouth in a smile. Arthur pulls his hand out of his pocket and hoists a giggling James up into the air. 

Today, Arthur doesn’t have to dream. 

 

“Are these for your next job?” Dom asks him, glancing over his shoulder at the drawings in his lap.

“No, they’re for our next house.”

“Well in that case, I think the two-story swimming pool is a little unrealistic.”

“You don’t say.” Arthur feels Dom’s smile behind his ear. 

“You’re working with Ariadne on this one, right?” Dom sits across from him on their little couch in the office. He kicks a foot up on the coffee table despite Arthur’s grimace, tilts his head back, and closes his eyes. 

“And Yusuf.” Despite his questions, Arthur feels that Dom isn’t particularly interested. He’s been working small jobs here and there on his own for a while now, so Dom’s worries have settled into a tactile peace. Arthur doesn’t really mind, but he wishes that his partner still exercised some interest in the work that brought them together. Instead, he gets only the vaguest questions about work, like any spouse asking their significant other how their day at the office was. 

It frustrates him only because Dom Cobb was the best. Is still the best, probably. He taught Arthur so much of what he knows now. He misses the part of their life they used to share only between the two of them. 

“Feel like a reunion?” He leans across the couch and puts his head in Dom’s lap. Automatically, a hand slides into his hair. 

“Sure. Tell them to stop by after the job’s over, if they want.” 

Arthur isn’t sure if Dom honestly believed that’s all he meant when he said reunion, or if he’s purposely avoiding temptation. Either way, he won’t push it, but they both know that Ariadne and Yusuf are just as unlikely to follow him back to the house.

Down the hall they hear a soft giggle. Both of the kids are supposed to be napping. Above him, Dom sighs. “I better get that.”

Later, Arthur finds him squeezed into James’ tiny bed with his son, both sleeping soundly. 

 

 

Arthur no longer wakes in the middle of the night without purpose; while once a light sleeper, he’s learned to sleep through a mini-apocalypse after living with Phillipa and James, who in particular doesn’t seem to go more than an hour without kicking the wall in his sleep hard enough that their own wall shakes. Tonight though, Arthur grapples for their digital alarm clock, which Dom insists on turning towards the wall where he can’t read it because it’s too damn bright. It’s 4:12 in the morning. 

Straining his ears, he can’t hear the telltale shuffles of one of the kids awake before they should be. Even James will sleep for another two hours. Relaxing back into bed, he closes his eyes and tries to drift back to sleep, wondering why it is that he’s awake in the first place. Mindlessly, he turns into Dom’s side, gently maneuvering his head under the man’s chin. 

It’s not quite a sigh – more a long, whispering breath that teases his hair. Arthur’s mind snaps into focus as he feels a twitch beneath him as well. He’s woken Dom up then. Without the slightest remorse, he closes his eyes again.

But there it is again – that breathy thing close to a whine this time. In any other situation, it would be obvious, but it’s not until Arthur extracts himself and looks down at Dom’s face that it clicks.

His eyes are rolling back and forth beneath his eyelids, his breathing is irregular, and his fingers are twitching. It hits Arthur like a slap in the face – Dom is dreaming again. Really dreaming. There’s no line or machine enabling this; this is real.

Fifteen minutes later Arthur is downstairs in the kitchen planning a big breakfast for the kids because he can’t sleep anymore. He pulls out the butter, the eggs, and the flour. He puts them all in a row based sequentially on when he’ll need them. Then come the bowls, the spoons. 

He cracks the eggs only after they’ve come to room temperature. James drifts downstairs right in time for the first batch of pancakes and waffles. There are muffins too. 

“Is Daddy awake yet?” he asks, still rubbing a fist into his eye. Arthur puts a tasteful amount of syrup on the Paddington Bear plate and places it in front of James. 

“No, Daddy is dreaming, baby.” 

James uses Arthur’s lap as his booster seat and sets into his breakfast. Arthur doesn’t eat anything. 

“Oh.” A piece of pancake falls out of James’ mouth and into Arthur’s lap. “I hope they’re good dreams.”

“Me too, baby, me too.”

 

 

In his next job, Arthur builds everything from the buildings to the streets to the railroad tracks, fully intended on being there this time. There is a little canary yellow house with white shutters next to the tracks, and beyond the tracks only open space. Wheat fields, and if you squint hard enough you can almost see a small group of diary cows grazing. 

The dream nearly collapses on itself because Arthur can’t focus; all he can see is the fields on fire. There’s too much sunlight on yellow, too much blistering light. Smoke on the horizon. Ariadne yanks him out of the dream the difficult way, and when he wakes up he wants to scream. He can’t build a simple dream for a simple job and Dom is dreaming again. Dreaming intricate things that not even he knows. 

“What’s wrong?” Ariadne asks, following him across the cheap motel floor they’ve rented for the job. “Is it Cobb? Is everything alright?”

“This has nothing to do with him.” And it doesn’t. Not anymore. Not when Dom has so firmly put his foot down on dreamshare. 

“The kids?”

“They’re fine.” They’re perfect. They’re his now. 

“Jesus, Arthur.” She grabs his elbow; he bristles. Frowning, Ariadne drops it and crosses her arms instead. “Get your shit together before you take any more jobs, alright?”

Ariadne telling him to pull it together is a hard slap to the face. He was her teacher; she would still be doodling on paper and living only strict realities and be happy with her life without ever knowing what true fulfillment is. She wouldn’t be anything, wouldn’t experience anything, if not for himself and Dom. 

“And definitely get it together before calling me again.”

Fire on the horizon.

 

 

“Where have you been? I called Yusuf. He said you finished the job days ago.”

He’s waited until their bedroom to confront him. Arthur sits on their bed – unmade, of course, in his absence – and folds his hands because there’s nothing in them.

“Where’s your bag? Shit, where’s the PASIV?”

“Left the bag. Dumped the PASIV.” 

“Christ, Arthur, what did you do?” Dom pulls his mobile out of his pocket and begins dialing. “I’m calling Yusuf back. He said you were acting strangely-“

“When were you going to tell me that you’re dreaming again?”

Dom stops, phone outstretched. After a moment, he disconnects and tosses it on the bed, running a hand through his hair. Downstairs, a faint thump. Normally, one or both of them would go to check that nothing was irreparably damaged, but not now. There are at least soft giggles that follow, enough to reassure them from a distance that no one’s hurt. 

“So? When were you going to tell me?” 

“I don’t even know when they started,” he says with his back to him still.

“Did you quit because you hoped they would come back?”

“No. Of course not.” Dom finally turns to him. “I did it for the kids. I did it so they could have a father.”

Quiet. There’s still a fire burning in the back of Arthur’s mind, and it’s spreading, but low and silently. About to smolder out, leaving just the ashes to prove it ever happened. 

“You dumped the PASIV to dream again,” Dom suggests quietly. He sits by him on the bed. 

“Maybe.” Arthur hasn’t slept well since throwing it over a misused bridge miles and miles away. “I’m not entirely sure why I did it. I don’t think I can quit like you did. I think I’ll need it again.”

“Nothing quite like it.” 

Arthur smiles, just marginally, and leans into Dom; the extractor said this to him the same as he said it to Ariadne. Now it’s the students moving on, leaving the teacher behind to retire. Maybe Arthur should consider retiring as well, but already he feels the itch right under his skin. He needs to create. Build. Extract. He needs to dream. 

“What’s it like now?” He asks. Are his dreams different? More vivid? Less vivid? Does he dream of Mal like he did in his own constructed dreams? Still a shadow, still just bits and pieces of her? Or is she finally complete again?

“It’s even better.” Dom kisses his temple. “I dream most when you’re here though, sleeping right beside me.” Lying side-by-side, close enough that they could still be hooked up to the PASIV, except Dom dreams alone, and Arthur not at all.

The emotion sticks in his throat like cotton. “Dom,” he croaks. “I don’t want to dream alone. I can’t – if we never dream together again – I don’t know if I can stand it.”

They’ve dreamed together for years, and the reality of never sharing a day outside of this house with these children, who will inevitably grown into adults and then strangers, it deadens him, hollows him out. Arthur chooses everything in his life – he has never been victim to a life set down for him like so many people. He could leave tomorrow on a flight to any city in the world and find a job, work it then leave for another city. He could live in every country before his lifetime is over, could see things few people think possible. 

“Share my dream with me,” Dom says. He’s never lied to Arthur about how he expected his life to go after inception was over – he wanted to go home and raise his kids. Give up any activities that could be deemed illegal. 

Arthur had snorted at the time. “Live the straight and narrow, you mean?” Truth was, Dom always liked the danger. It’s what drew him to his life – to Mal, then to Arthur himself, to his friends all over the world. It’s what gave him his peace, his freedom, and his family. 

Cobb smiled wistfully at him. “No. No, I’m going to live without fear.” 

Arthur’s own truth is that he’s spent so many years looking over his shoulder that he’s forgotten why he’s naturally suspicious, why he’s so fiercely protective of Dom, or why he has so many scars. He’s forgotten why he doesn’t dream at night, or why he wakes up every morning as tired as the night before.

“And say I were to come with you? Would you take me not as a partner in crime, but as someone to spend the end of your dull days with?”

He had been joking at the time, because whatever they had between them, it was something Arthur always knew would last only as long as they were partners in dreamshare. Then there came the moment when Dom woke up on their flight to LA, and after a quick glance with Saito, he looked straight at Arthur, and Arthur knew exactly what he was asking. They landed, went through customs, and when they collected their bags, Arthur laid his on top of Dom’s. 

Now, lying in bed with Dom that night, Arthur realizes he’s been living with another kind of fear. He takes the kids to school, packs their lunches, makes the bed he shares with Dom every morning, but he can’t help looking over his shoulder at her picture sitting on the dresser. He never asked Dom to move it and he never will, but he’s never let go of his suspicions about his place at Dom’s side. He won’t be a replacement, and he won’t make her mistakes.

 

 

Arthur no longer sleeps through the night like he used to; it’s not just James kicking the wall or Dom snoring in his ear, it’s the quiet creaks of the house. The trees outside moving. The owls hooting. He wakes up every time, and every time he reaches for his die. It’s been sixty-three days since he’s used Somnacin to go under. He hasn’t dreamt a single day since.

But something is happening. He wakes up and almost remembers something – not a dream, because they’re all memories, but there’s something to them. There’s something to the sequence of them. Something that gives him hope. 

This night he wakes up and checks up on both of his sleeping babies. He sits at the foot of the bed where Dom sleeps and glances at the picture on the dresser. He’s not Mal – he’s smarter than Mal, braver than Mal. He looks down at his die now and sees only a loaded die. What he has is real. What dreams have to offer him doesn’t seem tangible any longer. 

Quietly, he walks downstairs and slips the die into the bottom of the sugar bowl. They never reach the bottom of it, because Dom is always filling it to the top every week, so he doesn’t worry about anyone finding it there. It will exist there only in Arthur’s presence. 

He doesn’t need the die to know for certain, just like soon he won’t need Somnacin to dream. Arthur will sleep the whole night through, and he won’t be alone when he does it.


End file.
